


Reentry

by ClaireVoyant (emigolde1)



Category: Sicario (2015), Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-01 14:16:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15144929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emigolde1/pseuds/ClaireVoyant
Summary: The world feels different. It’s what he imagines coming back from the moon would be like, finding that everything else is the same, but maybe you’re different now. The reentry has changed every piece of you.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> So, am I the only one who left Sicario: Day of the Soldado thinking that Matt and Alejandro were the most compelling pairing of the entire two films? Kate Macer, who? Matt was almost freaking CRYING in that helicopter out of Mexico, I don't care what you say, fight me, he was. In honor of his brokenness, this is now my head-cannon for the post-film events.
> 
> Some things may be wrong because I've only seen Sicario: DOTS once so far, so I'm working off memory for some of this.

**Chapter One**

The world feels different. It’s what he imagines coming back from the moon would be like, finding that everything else is the same, but maybe you’re different now. The reentry has changed every piece of you.

Matt’s barely holding it together as they fly back to Corpus. Some indescribable feeling has a vice-grip on his throat and everything is slightly blurry at the edges. He has a ready lie about fucking dirt kicking up into his face, but no one seems to notice or ask him for it. He can feel eyes on him though and he knows across from him the girl is staring with a haunted, accusatory look.

He meets her gaze and then she too looks close to breaking down, but rather than offer any comfort (because what would be the point, really) he just shakes his head bitterly and looks away. He can’t look the girl in the eyes because if he does, then he really will lose it.

He stays with her like a shade when they get back to base and unload. Cynthia looks beyond pissed, but he just holds up a palm against her fury, his other gripping the Reyes girl’s arm like she’ll float away he doesn’t hang on.

“It’s done,” he says and doesn’t have to elaborate for her to understand there are multiple meanings carried through the words. “She’s going into WITSEC. Or we’re walking. Your choice.”

“You’re not really giving me a fucking choice, here,” she spits through gritted teeth.

He grins tightly without humor and walks away, pulling the girl along like she’s a deflating balloon, “Just make the fucking call.”

He sits her down on some crates and manages to scrounge around and locate a clean-looking rag, which he tosses to her so she can try to wipe some of the blood off her face, out of her hair, off her hands. He begins undoing his tac-vest as she slowly swipes at the red smears on her skin.

“He’s dead.”

Her voice is quiet but it runs through Matt like a knife between the ribs, causing him to pause in his movement, try to catch his breath. After a moment, he resumes removing the vest, throwing it off to some corner somewhere, and then sets himself to looking over his weapon to give his hands something to do.

“I know.”

“They shot him,” she continues, “I saw it.”

“I know,” he says again.

“I think,” she says softly, “I think he was a good man.”

Matt’s teeth grind against each other and his hand closes so tightly around the grip of his SIG516 that he’s sure to leave welts on his palm, but at least he manages to keep from backhanding her. He nearly sinks into the white-hot rage that rises up within him at her audacity.

“You have no idea what he was,” he finds himself saying, voice low and dangerous and worse than anything he could have yelled.

She says nothing after that.

He stays with her through the bureaucratic assfuckery that is her rendition into the custody of the Marshal Service. The two badges they dispatch remind him of Macer and her partner in a way and they ask the girl dumb questions like, “are you aware you won’t be able to contact any of your friends? Any of your family?”

It comes out then, pours out of her. The fact that she doesn’t have any friends. That her father—and what else should he have expected from an evil son of a bitch like Carols Reyes—would regularly beat her pill-popping mother and her both. That no, she won’t miss anyone. And Matt’s thrown by how much he didn’t know about this kid and her life before he decided to rip her out of it. It hadn’t been part of the op so he hadn’t had to know.

He does thoroughly check the nice, safe, white-bread couple WITSEC wants to place her with in upstate New York. He crawls up Bob and June Ortiz’s asses so far he know what condom brand they have in their nightstand and how many times Bobby shits in a week. They’re boring but harmless and he gives his assent as her Guardian ad Litem.

The girl only has one request and that’s to be called “Carina”. She’s cautioned against it by the Marshals but she maintains that it isn’t a name her father or his enemies would know. Which isn’t strictly speaking true.

It is a name Matt knows.

“Let her have it,” he tells the Marshals. “It’s a good name.”

He doubts Reyes would know to look for his missing daughter using the name of a dead eight year old little deaf girl he ordered to be thrown into a vat of acid almost fifteen years ago.

After an unemotional goodbye to “Carina Ortiz”, he hops a troop transport back to Langley, strolls into his section chief’s office and lets him know that he’s fucking done. He’s put in enough years that his pension has vested, so “retiring” is how they phrase it. “Fuck ‘em all,” is how Matt puts it.

Steve Forsing calls and tries to talk him out of it when he hears the news, but it’s half-hearted at best. The decision was pretty much made when Matt decided to throw a goddamned torch on his orders and save the kid, and they both know it.

“Where’re you gonna go?” asks Steve.

“I gotta go back,” he says, cell cradled between his shoulder and ear as he shoves clothes into a duffle bag on the bed of the impersonal apartment he keeps in Virginia.

“Back,” echoes Steve. “Back where? Back to fucking Mexico? What the hell for, man?”

“I gotta get the body,” Matt says, because ‘the body’ is easier to say than ‘him’ or a name he’s not ready to say yet.

“Jesus Christ, Matt,” Steve swears. “You gotta let this go. This thing you’ve always had for Gillick, it’s not good. I mean, it was bound to come down to you or him someday. You have to know that. I mean, we all know how Old Yeller end-”

Matt hangs up on him.

Well, to be more precise, he pitches the cellphone so hard into the wall that it shatters into about fifty-seven pieces.

Steve’s always been a loudmouth dipshit. It’s something Matt used to positively delight in because of the way it got on other people’s nerves. But he’s really not in the fucking mood right now.

It’s strange crossing the boarder alone without a convoy swarmed around him. It’s even stranger rolling his truck to a stop at the Laredo checkpoint and flashing a passport at the Mexican Boarder Agent. He’s gotten spoiled living in a world without these kinds of simple logistics.

It takes him almost four hours to get to the site his carefully saved coordinates are leading him to in middle of nowhere, Mexico. He has to double back a few times and take more than one stupid route to make sure he’s not being followed.

When he gets there, he’s disappointed by what he finds at the bottom of the pit.

One body. Not Alejandro’s.

Fuck.

The possibilities run through his head, the worst of which being that one of the Cartels came and claimed the body like some kind of fucked up trophy.

Then he notices the boot prints, and the struggling, blood-trailed path through the sand. The size and tread are right, even as reason tells him it’s improbable. Maybe he really was compromised. Broken so bad by this thing that he can’t even see reality anymore.

But the trail continues up and out of the hole. He tracks it along for a few miles until he meets a familiar patch of road and the bullet-pocked SUV where he shot his career all to hell.

There’s still several bodies laid out in the road, their flesh stinking as the elements have begun to peel away skin and muscle and rot from exposure. Three are laid out further away, where tire marks and memory tell Matt the ugly-ass green truck used to be. Someone’s taken it.

No. Not someone.

“Son of a bitch,” He mutters to the wind.

Guilt sinks like a stone in his gut.

He’d come after them. He’d tried to get back.

“God damnit.”

He makes his way back to his truck and tracks his way back to the stretch of road he’d walked to and then further on, heading North because that’s the way he would’ve gone. He passes a bombed out sedan swerved to the side of the road a ways up like a macabre bread crumb and at least that tells him Alejandro might be with it enough to kill. It's a comforting thought.

He maybe expects, half hope and half fear, that he’ll come across the green SUV somewhere in a ditch along the way, its driver slumped over and dead from a wound that should have put him down before he got two steps out of that hole in the desert. But he never does.

He just keeps going North.

When he makes it back up as far as the boarder his thoughts shift course.

If he were a beat-all-to-hell, half-dead Alejandro, where would he go?


	2. Chapter Two

**Chapter Two**

 

The house in Oceanside is right on the beach, about twelve blocks down from the Pier. It’s old and small, but has a sort of charm to it. It’s nicer and has more personality than all the other safe houses Matt keeps around the country. But that’s maybe because it’s the only place he really thinks of as actually being his.

It used to be his mom’s place when she’d been a single, independent woman in the 60’s and she’d kept it even after she married Matt’s dad and moved to Chicago, and after the divorce when she moved back to California, and then passed ownership on to him when she’d died of cancer when he’d been 17. He’d kept it—as much for the sentimental value as the actual property value—all through college and then through his years with Delta Force, and then into his time at the Agency. He never spends much time there, but what time he does get always feels more like his own than any other.

He wasn’t supposed to have ever told Alejandro about the place, let alone have brought him there. It was about as far off from Standard Operating Procedure as you could get, short of Matt’s latest stunt with the Reyes girl. But then, things never really went by SOP where Alejandro Gillick was concerned.

Matt had been running agents for nearly twenty years by the time he’d met Alejandro. He knew his job and he did it well. He had that way of connecting with people and charming them just enough to get them nice and pliable, just the way he needed them, without getting himself too attached.

From the beginning Gillick had been different.

He shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t like Matt had a wife, dead or alive. And he didn’t have kids of his own. There was no reason for him to have connected with the brokenness that Alejandro wore over and within himself like amour. But he did all the same.

Somehow those sad, hooded eyes had met his and the two men had formed an understanding for each other. It was like seeing some other part of himself reflected back in another person, the way you look into a body of water and can see the distorted sky echoed back in color and light.

The front door is unlocked when he gets there. He doesn’t have to test it to know. There’s a green post-it note stuck to the door with a crudely drawn stick figure on what looks like maybe a surfboard. He smirks and shakes his head at it before pushing the door open and heading in.

The back sliding doors that lead out to the pool deck and the beach beyond it are open, the salt sea-air blowing through the curtains. The house is so quiet as he walks through that he can hear the crashing of the waves outside and the distant sound of kids playing off down the beach.

Alejandro is in the kitchen. Matt’s eyes are drawn to him from the doorway as he stands there behind the center island, his arms braced out on the countertop like it’s the only thing holding him upright.

He’s wearing an old, faded Cubs tee-shirt Matt doesn’t remember leaving here and a pair of his cargo pants. The clothes fit him well enough, if a little tight at the shoulders, hips and thighs where Alejandro’s always been bigger than him. His hair’s wet too, like he’d just gotten out of the shower.

“You wearing my boxers, too?” Matt jokes, setting his duffle down and slowly approaching into the kitchen like there’s a wild animal in it, cautious but with confident purpose.

“All you, right down the Crocs,” Alejandro answers back, scratchy and hoarse like he hasn’t had enough water in a few days. “I suddenly feel like traveling to a developing country and inciting a coup. I think it’s the footwear.”

“God bless America,” Matt smirks. “You look good. Better than I was expecting,” he admits.

In answer Alejandro just shifts his weight from one foot to the other, turns his head and displays what had been obscured by the way he’d been standing. There’s a patch of gauze taped to his cheek but even with that Matt can see that the entire right side of his face is an explosion of swelling and discoloration.

“Jesus,” Matt mutters, taking a step forward, his hand outstretched towards Alejandro like it’s got a mind of its own. He pulls back at the last second though, careful not to touch. He knows it’s not a good idea to go pawing at the guy when he’s hurting unless he’s sure it’s welcome. He’d nearly lost a finger not heeding that once upon a time.

“You should be dead,” say Matt. His eyes meet Alejandro’s and he feels himself coming apart at the seams again. “Glad you’re not. Real glad.”

Alejandro makes a sound that’s somewhere between a grunt and a hum and cants his head slightly, which Matt understands to be his assent. So Matt steps closer until he’s right up in the other man’s space.

He reaches out again and the tips of his fingers brush lightly against a patch of skin just below his hairline and above his brow. He can see Alejandro holding himself tensely, as if bracing for pain, but then Matt moves his hand away and back down, palm curving loosely around the side of Alejandro’s neck so that his pulse is a rhythmic flutter beneath Matt’s thumb.

“You see a doctor yet?”

Alejandro shrugs and Matt understands this to mean that he’d seen one, but likely some kind of black-market, boarder-clinic type deal that only provided for the basics; a sloppy patch-up job, some dressings for his wounds and some broad-spectrum antibiotics.

“Yeah, okay,” Matt nods, eyes still raking over the damage, certainty set in his jaw. “As soon as we can, we’ll get you to see a guy I know. Owes me a favor and he’s good. Probably end up with barely a scar.”

Alejandro nods once. Matt can read the question in his expression.

“She’s fine,” he tells him. “WITSEC’s got her placed with some golf-playing insurance adjusters in Any Town, USA. Demanding little brat only asked to keep the name you gave her. I think she got sweet on you,” he teases.

“She actually reminded me more of Elena,” Alejandro admits. Even after all this time he still says his wife’s name like a prayer. “Tough,” he explains. “And sad.”

Matt nods thoughtfully. “Yeah, she was something. If I liked kids I’d probably even kinda miss the little shit.”

Alejandro makes a sound that would’ve been a chuckle if anyone else had made it. From him it just sounds like a change in his breathing, but Matt knows it well.

“When do you go?” asks Alejandro. They both only ever ask each other when, because they know the where and whys aren’t always free.

Matt’s lips quirk. “I’ve got nothing to hurry for,” he answers and knows Alejandro will understand without him having to explain.

He gets this regretful look though and that makes Matt want to go back to Langley and throw a lit flare into the file room, try to burn the place to the ground. “Fuck ‘em all,” he says decisively.

Matt brings his other hand up and closes it around the other side of Alejandro’s neck, pulls until their foreheads meet, careful to only press against his left side. He closes his eyes, breathes in the smell of soap and salt. He feels Alejandro’s hands come up and close loosely around his writs, a thumb moving in slow circles over where his own pulse beats.

“Glad we made it out,” Matt murmurs.

“Mmm,” says Alejandro. Which Matt knows means agreement.

Matt closes what little space there is between them, presses his lips to their rough, dry counterparts. And for that moment, this is all either of them need in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned for an epilogue.


	3. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

His eyes glance over the people walking this way and that, before looking again to the exits. It’s born more of habit and training than any real concern. Truth be told, Matt’s more worried about finishing his $6 ICEE before it turns to liquid than he is of some kind of ambush.

From the corner booth in the food-court, Matt had tracked the kid going in about thirty minutes ago. He'd been equally pleased as disappointed to see that the kid had apparently come in alone. If he’d had a posse backing him, Matt maybe could’ve made it so things kicked off and in the confusion he could’ve taken the little fucker out. But then, it isn’t his place. Not his call.

After a minute or two more the door to the office of Cukos Chicken opens and the kid comes out looking pale and shaken, more like the snot-nosed teen he really is than the bad-ass gangbanger he’d thought he was going in. He meanders through the crowd, dazed, and Matt’s eyes track him all the way to the exit before he feels the air around him shift and a familiar frame slides into the booth beside him, a warm, solidness pressing against his side and his leg.

“He bite?” asks Matt.

“Hmm,” answers Alejandro.

“Yeah,” Matt nods, “He bit.” He takes a deep drag off his straw and continues to scan the crowd just to make sure they don’t get any stray blow-back from this little outing. “Gahh!” he suddenly cries out, wrenching the straw away and pressing a hand to the middle of his forehead. “Fucking brain freeze.”

“Put your tongue to the roof of your mouth,” says Alejandro, who has taken to scanning the crowd like Matt had been doing.

“Huh?”

“It’ll stop.”

Matt does as advised and is amazed to discover that it works almost instantly. “Well, shit. Aren’t you just Mr. Science today.” He turns his head towards his partner and sticks out his tongue, asking, “Ith ut loo?”

Alejandro just stares at him so Matt returns his tongue to his mouth and frowns, looking down at his cup of melting blue ICEE. “These things are terrible. Why did I buy this?”

His partner just shrugs again, as if to answer, ‘why do you do any of the things you do’.

“True enough,” Matt agrees. “Come on,” he nudges against Alejandro’s side to get them both up and out of the booth. “We’ve got a few hours before we have to be anywhere and I’ll buy you a scotch if you tell me I’m pretty.”

Alejandro’s head lolls back and he looks down the bridge of his nose at Matt, the corners of his mouth quirked into a taught, near-smile.

“Aw,” says Matt and he claps a hand to Alejandro’s shoulder to steer them towards the doors. “Keep up that sweet talk and you’re definitely getting laid tonight, bud.”

“Mentiras,” grumbles Alejandro, reminding with regret, “Not enough time.”

“No, es verdad, parcero,” Matt maintains, accent purposefully bad because he enjoys the wince his American phrased Spanish evokes from his partner’s expression. “I can be _very_ efficient.”

Matt’s hand squeezes into the meat of Alejandro’s suit-clad shoulder as he keeps them moving towards the exit, and he pop a few pieces of gum from the pocket of his cargos into his mouth, chewing away.

Alejandro’s eyes give him an assessing look as they walk, pausing pointedly over the brown flip-flops on Matt’s feet. Matt knows Alejandro’s thinking that anywhere serving even half-way decent scotch isn’t going to want him coming in looking like he does.

“Ah, you worry too much about my clothes,” Matt easily refutes the unvoiced thought, flashing the man at his side a toothy grin. “Don’t forget, I can be very charming too.”

Alejandro sighs and Matt laughs and the sun shines on them as they walk out into the world together.

 

The End


End file.
